Three Answers To A Question: “Is It Bad To Eat 100 McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets?”
This is an essay I wrote about a year ago and pitched to a few websites. I failed to get it published. Here it is here.
To start, what, whither, whence our national obsession with eating competitions? Or television shows mythologizing such. Man Versus Food? Call me crazy, but I don’t think food should be an antagonist in your life. Eating for the sake of eating is the most vulgar and obnoxiously American thing you can do. It’s an atavistic symbol of post-war boom and excess. If you haven’t looked around lately, then please, I’ll give you a few moments to refresh your view. Things are not going very well unless — and this is its own head-crushing paradox — unless you’re in a recently bailed-out industry like General Motors and JPMorgan Chase, or you happen to control half the world’s computer supply like Apple.
Even in a death-spiraling economy that’s seeing most other restaurants profit-starved, McDonald’s is stronger than ever. Sez the New York Times:
In 2011, the average free-standing McDonald’s restaurant in the United States generated nearly $2.6 million in sales, an increase of roughly 13 percent since 2008. Last year, sales nearly doubled the industry’s projected growth rate by growing 4.8 percent over the previous year. And people weren’t just buying the McRib, the highly processed pork sandwich whose popularity baffles even some at McDonald’s. Sales of the Big Mac, the chain’s signature product that was first introduced nationwide in 1968, rose 10 percent last year, helping to push the company’s stock price to nearly $100 a share.
Filling your gut with barely-food ‘food’ is terrible, but giving even one more red cent to freaking McDonald’s is perhaps even worse.
Oh yeah. And corporations are literally evil. They try to get vehicular manslaughterers off the hook so they don’t have to pay out premiums. Corporations and their billionaire owners are buying all the elections this fall. To quote a Wells Toverian question, “How is it that Business, during this election, is somehow the wellspring of all that is golden and pie-and-hot-dog scented in these United States? Wasn’t it Business that got us into this mess?” And hell, just to bring it all together, Nobel Prize winning economist-cum-left-wing-wonk Paul Krugman invoked McDonald’s infamous “pink slime” to describe Paul Ryan’s ridiculous budget plan. Christ, what an asshole.
So what you have with this eating one hundred McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets is a combination of the worst aspects of America: middle class overdrawn excess, national exceptionalism, and ever-present corporate ownership of everything under the sun. It is gross on just about ever level.
McDonald’s is the new American secular satan, or maybe an eschatological (or simply scatological) recurrence of our world’s demise, and eating one hundred Chicken McNuggets is just about on par with human sacrifice. Have some self-respect, please.
McDonald’s is great. Screw you and your elitism. McDonald’s feeds millions of people per day, for a lot less money (and time) than the alternatives. No less a cooking authority than Mark Bittman blithely asserts that “you can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people”. That is true! He also says, “if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway” and “cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch”. Mmmm, not so fast. Tell you what: A) I don’t drive, and B) McDonald’s is literally a block away from my apartment. Here’s another thing: you know what I find to be a real pleasure? Not spending two hours making a roast chicken dinner. It’s a pleasure to eat, but not a pleasure to 1) shop for (and carry home, via walking); 2) prepare; 3) roast; 4) clean up after. Steps 1 through 4 will take me from the moment I stop working to the moment I kind of want to go to bed. Going to McDonald’s and buying a few chicken sandwiches will take me five minutes.
And I don’t think I’m in some impossible situation! I have a lot of free time, and I like to cook. But it is a leisure activity, and most people (outside of professional cooks and food writers) do not get to combine eating with leisure. At least not if they’re short on time, money, or both.
Other arguments against McDonald’s —
You think the food is bad, unhealthy, and will basically kill you? Ok. Have you ever heard of the Olympics? Has that concept come across your mental radar lately? Have you heard about Usain Bolt and Gabby Douglass, two of the most successful Olympians this year? Well they both eat McDonald’s.
Maybe you think McDonalds alienates people from their food and the labor of their food preparers. Please. Check your dimly-understood concept of false consciousness at the door. We’re talking about life here — not a libertarian political philosophy thread on Reddit. (And TBH, I’m sure those guys eat McDonald’s, anyway.) I mean, as douchey as he was, that guy on Girls (Ray) was right: McDonald’s offers you consistency in a world of upheaval and a low price meal in an increasingly expensive world.
The food at McDonald’s honestly tastes fine — good if you have broad taste, acceptable if you’re a food snoot, and it’s consistent at the very least. The very worst thing you can say about McDonald’s is that it’s common.
It’s not as if what is good, cool, or, I guess, swag isn’t historically conditioned. Have you ever noticed how many people wear Chuck Taylors. Perhaps you’re unaware that there’s a whole racially-fraught racial history of athletic footwear? But does anyone really talk about this? Not really — we all just accept that for a low price, we can get a comfortable, semi-stylish unit of footwear and we just move on with our fucking day.
There is nothing wrong with McDonald’s or with eating one hundred Chicken McNuggets.
Like many things that can be accounted for by logically-argued yet dialectical and opposed principles, it is more complicated than all that.
I have personally ventured beyond the good and evil known as McDonald’s. A few weekends ago, I actually ate one hundred McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. Thus, maybe, I can speak with hard-earned knowledge about whether it’s good or bad.
Let’s go back a little. This whole eating one hundred Chicken McNuggets thing started in the manner of many like things: as a late-night drunken bull session-type thought experiment. It started innocently enough with that timeless knife versus bat debate, viz., if two equally skilled combatants were armed, one with a bat and one with a knife, who would win in a to-the-death variety of contest. After an hour’s go around, somehow, the one hundred McDonald’s Chicken McNugget Challenge came up.
Now, let’s be clear. I am not any sort of competitive eater — at all. But I am competitive in that totally bullheaded What’s Eating Gilbert Grape stop climbing up the water tower style. The kneejerk ‘Oh you said such and such can’t be done? Well I can do it’ way. And once the wheels were set into argumentative-rhetorical motion, the whole eating a hundred Chicken McNuggets thing became bigger than me and my friends — or at least it felt that way. It was sort of like how Waka Flocka describes his life: “Let them guns blam./ This a .44 bulldog/ It cannot jam.” But with a whole lot less guns. And a whole lot more McNuggets.
Since one of the main spectator-darers had a gig the next weekend, I had two weeks notice. I googled around for, you know, “competitive eating” tips, but I couldn’t exactly match up any advise or reportage with the task at hand. See, the terms were that I would eat one hundred (100) McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, but I’d have practically a whole day. Now that might sound incredibly easy: as you’ll see it kind of is and kind of isn’t. But what it certainly wasn’t was something like what Bill “Not That Bill Simmons” Simmons (aka “El Wingador”) does or what Kobayashi does. This wasn’t an eat-a-lot-really-fast-type of thing. It would be more a marathon than a sprint. So I looked for something sustainable, and since, duh, Olympic fever, I thought of Michael Phelps’s ridiculous diet and figured, hey, why don’t I just try to exercise a lot and see if I can’t ramp up my metabolic needs.
I went to the gym every day (well, every other day). I rode my bike. I’m not sure if I really gained a lot of metabolic velocity, but I certainly felt better. The day before the challenge, I basically fasted. The next morning I went to the gym and only managed to run two miles before I thought I was going to die from dizziness or that thing where you drink too much water and your heart fizzles out. I realized I could probably be anorexic, since it actually felt pretty great being totally empty. And with just a few hours of hindsight, I could have told you with complete certainty that it feels better to be empty than full.
The most sinister thing about eating a whole lot of Chicken McNuggets was that I didn’t seem to gain any weight. I weighed myself before McNugget one. I weighed myself after McNugget forty (about thirty minutes later), and I weighed two pounds more. I weighed myself an hour later, and I weighed two pounds less. Throughout the day and into the night I weighed myself and I never weighed more than a pound or two more than my starting weight. Sometimes I weighed less. I know from carrying them around that McNuggets have mass. Where does it go once you eat it? Maybe each nugget is just an instantiation of a Platonic Nugget in the sky, and whence consumed, they simply vanish on earth and rejoin their ur-form. Or, jeez. I don’t even want to know.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
The challenge occurred at my friend’s apartment in Chinatown. It began on noon on a Saturday. On the way, I stopped at that one insanely busy McDonald’s on Bowery and got a twenty rack of nuggets (with classic tangy bbq sauce). The sauces were actually a point of contention, with one faction of spectators assuming the sauce would be too filling or calorie-rich to accommodate a massive McNugget ingestion. I sort of hadn’t thought about it one way or the other. Once I arrived, my host went out and purchased a supplemental twenty, and I sat down to eat forty McNuggets to get a good jump on the hundred nugget goal. Now, I have to say the first twenty went down in something like lickety split. I was very hungry, and so I reached normal satiety and felt, well, pleased. The next ten went down a bit slower. More of a good thing is increasingly less good. About twenty minutes had passed — less than one minute per nugget. The final ten nuggets of this leg took about fifteen minutes. The sauces were indispensable. I’m assuming that if you were to eat about 4x your daily allotment (in fifteen minutes, no less) of anything, it will start to taste pretty bad. But nuggets thirty-one through forty tasted like nothing else I’ve ever had. “Greasy” doesn’t begin to describe it. Noxious + greasy. Strangely chalky, crumbly yet viscous. Perhaps, in a Lovecraftian way, semi-alive still. They tasted like some sort of poison that was just quite not strong enough to kill a man. My body still felt like it was eating at an insanely rapid pace, but I was eating less and less of each nugget. What was once a one-nugget chomp inexorably became a half-nugget chomp, then a quarter-nugget chomp. By the end, I was sort of nibbling away at nuggets and washing them down with water. Gross.
And but so, that was basically the worst of it. I had hours and hours to eat a hundred nuggets, and I had just gotten 40% of the way there in a bit over thirty minutes. I set a personal goal of four to six hours. I was queasy but cocky. I drank a beer. Two hours later, I ordered up twenty more nuggets.
Eating a lot of Chicken McNuggets is somewhat akin to radioactive decay. You can measure it in half-lives. The first half of this leg went down surprisingly easy, again. My stomach perked right up just from smelling them. I felt a little hungry, even though rationally I knew I shouldn’t be. The second half was torture, again, but I did it. I smoked a cigarette. I drank another beer. I was 60% of the way there, and only about two hours had passed.
Things started accelerating at this point. My friend’s apartment has a modest living room in which we were all decamped. It was cosy and there was an eclectic crowd. Lawyers, musicians, finance types, doctors, musicians, scientists. It was like Mad Men, but with more chicken nuggets and less misogyny and martinis. And then there was me, the monkey. The entertainment. Again, there was something of a dialectic at play because on the one hand I knew I was doing something intrinsically stupid and eminently mockable. Yet I was the whole raison d’être for the event, and it was a fun event. There was also that stiff and competitive spirit putting steel in my spine (or stomach, as it were). So I just pushed on.
I had originally conceived of the One Hundred McNugget Challenge (#100nuggetchallenge on twitter) as a day of competition. I mean, a quarter of the world away the Olympics were winding down. So we gathered a bunch of games, but only ended up playing Scattergories a few times. Most people just A) aren’t that competitive or, B) are so competitive that they make all the A group not really want to play games. There’s something a little off-putting about competition in a social setting, which I suppose explains the predominance of fandom.
The real competition ended up being, I think, me versus the “sodium headaches”. See, after I ate sixty McNuggets, I started downing the rest in groups of six. I figured seven more six packs and I’d be done. But at this point, every time I had a nugget, I started sweating and my head hurt. I’d had maybe two beers and three cigarettes, so I was pretty sure it was the nuggets. (Duh.) The sodium headaches were the worst.
Ok, this is getting a little tedious. I’m starting to get a flashback sodium headache just thinking about eating all those nuggets. Let’s just skip ahead.
At the stroke of 8:30 that night, I ate my hundredth Chicken McNugget. Then we went downstairs and drank some shots. Then we came upstairs and drank some shots. I was too full of pseudo-chicken to get drunk, but it seemed like everyone else was having a good time. I felt strangely fine.
Not the next day! Now, there was a drunk guy downstairs in front of the bar under where my friend’s place is. He made mention of going to India and “peeing out of his butt” and indicated that the same would happen to me. (Because he ate so much McDonald’s in India?) That did not happen. In fact, I faced no gastrointestinal distress or even irregularities. (Again, I think the Platonic Nugget Theory best explains the strange Conservation Of Energy-defying behavior of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.) What I did feel was sick. Like, very sick as if I had all the colds and all the flus in the entire world. I could chalk that up to drinking and smoking, but let’s be honest. I drink and smoke all the time. I do not eat one hundred McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets very often. It was probably that that did it to me. Do Chicken McNuggets contain cold cultures? Or does eating 5,000 calories and 100,000 mg of sodium just take it out of you? I don’t now — clearly I’m no medical professional or else I wouldn’t even have attempted the feat.
Now that I’ve had some time to reflect, do I think it’s bad to eat one hundred McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets? Well, I hate to be one of those slippery, shades of gray types, but it sort of depends. Do I relish the thought of giving McDonald’s about $30 in exchange for five days’s worth of food, and then eating it all in an eight hours stretch? No. That’s sort of terrible, I think. It’s not the worst thing, but it’s 100% definitely something I would not do again. In fact, to be honest, I used to eat at McDonald’s all the time. Two for $3 breakfast sandwiches, $1 McDoubles, whatever. It is cheap and fast, and I’m broke and busy. But I’m willing to spend more time or more money in order to not eat anything that comes from outside the provenance of the Golden Arches for as long as possible.
The whole catalyst of the challenge, though? The stupid-competitive thing that automatically makes me say, “Yeah I could do that” whenever someone says someone couldn’t do something? I begrudgingly have to say yes to that. Over and over again, yes. It is not about challenges. It’s about challenge.
I think pretty frequently about this one part in Infinite Jest where the vaguely Heideggerian tennis instructor Schtit says, “‘Hit. Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here.” I like to think of “occurring” as a special mode of existence. Of course, simply existing is existence, but occurring is, to me, an especially existential existence. A particularly verb-y sort of being that doesn’t normally, well, occur. It’s the sort of being that jumps up and down waving its arms, saying, “Hey I’m here. This is me. I am being.” Stupid bullheaded competition is, for me, an occasion for occurrence. That’s maybe why people really love sports, twitter, and trap rap ad libs: they’re all eminently self-reflective modes of existing, occurring. So, yes: I would not exactly ever recommend anyone ever eat one hundred McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. You will feel terrible, perhaps slightly exploited, and quite sick for the next few days. I would advise everyone to find their own version of eating one hundred McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, though. Maybe you have a higher mind or better goals. Cure a disease. Write a novel. Defy Woody Allen and eat terrible food and so much of it. Occur.
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